My Last Five Years of Work

The 8-hour work day, weekends, time off—hard-fought and won by the labor movement!—seem to have been triumphs for human health and well-being. Why should we assume that stopping here is right? Why should we assume that less work was better in the past, but less work now would be worse?

This suggests that how people fare psychologically with their post-AGI unemployment will depend heavily on how they use their time, not how much of it there is—there is a path to positive well-being, if people spend time exercising, playing with their kids, spending time with friends, and so on

The common assumption about automation, even setting aside the financial effects, is that people will be incredibly unhappy without work.

A rough analogy to the current LLM process is that making a new model is like baking a cake. You figure out your data and algorithms—like mixing the batter—and then you pretrain the model, that is, run it on a large number of computers for several months—like putting it in the oven—and then at the end you do some “post training”—like frosting and d... See more

For the same reason these systems will be helpful with anything, we should expect that these systems will be able to help with the problems that they create. If we believe there are solutions to unhappiness or a feeling of a loss of purpose, and that these solutions can be found with intelligence, then we should expect these systems to be able to h... See more

A renowned AI researcher once told me that he is practicing for post-AGI by taking up activities that he is not particularly good at: jiu-jitsu, surfing, and so on, and savoring the doing even without excellence. This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best ... See more

I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy. I suppose we’ll soon find out.

Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task.