We are at the top of the hype curve for AI. It’s very good at specific tasks, ie speech to text, object recognition, but cannot reason at a high level. Although advances in RL are showing some promise with planning, I don’t think we’re nearly as close to fully self driving vehicles everywhere in all conditions as anyone thought. I think it’s hard to predict when advances will happen that will enable automation in healthcare and education. Most healthcare recommender systems I’ve seen turn into glorified search upon closer examination.
Even without high level reasoning, software can replace a lot of routine jobs, which I think speaks more to the fact that routine jobs are not fit for humans than the humanness of software.
For example in the physical realm, working an assembly line is mind-numbing, and relatively unfulfilling. A robotic arm can take over.
And now in the cognitive realm, sticking to a strict call center script or taking orders at a fast food restaurant is equally uninteresting, and if speech to text + a decision tree can do that, then that's good.
As long as we don't leave people behind, removing in-human jobs is imo a net good.
