Because there were other jobs, since there were still jobs that humans could do better or cheaper than machines could. An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process. What's left for humans to do, but receive UBI?
The grim future you are painting is one where humans have no jobs because everything is automated. So then we can just play games perform art and let ai do all the crap. Sounds good. People who own the land/resources will want to be paid and there will always be jobs for performers, custom chefs, machine maintainers, teachers of how ai works, politicians that govern use of ai in and across borders. Stop being a child and think about how the world works.
Haven't seen any AI potters, quilters, muralists or landscape gardeners yet.
It's replacing work that is purely to do with information.
Years ago there was talk about the "anywheres" vs. the "somewheres" - people who can do their jobs from anywhere (home, a cafe, a plane, the other side of the world) vs people whose work is necessaily rooted to a particular place. Your plumbers and farmers and retail workers.
AI can replace "anywhere" work, but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.
>but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.
I agree there's little progress in robotics, relative to AI. But "many years away" might mean just 10 years away. You can buy this robot for 16 grand USD:
What types of jobs do you think humans will remain superior at forever? Or are you only commenting on the short-term improbability of humans becoming generally outcompeted?
Highly tactile jobs and those in unstandardized environments (plumbers, electricians, etc) are famously difficult for machines to do, and they’ve made little to no progress in that department.
It's true that general-purpose robots have made little progress, compared to general-purpose AI, but the reasons for that might just be financial. AI has become a self-justifying busines model whereas generalist robots are still academic projects, kind of how deep learning was a decade+ ago. Maybe making tactile-aware robots that can navigate random environments will end up being subsumed by ML algorithms using cheapo hardware, kind of like this:
My guess is that it's just an expensive toy, only useful to robotics researchers. But I can imagine in 10 years the big LLM+vision models could somehow pilot them, perhaps very slowly compared to a human, but as long as they can finish the job at 0.1% of a human's wage, it might not really matter how much slower they are.
You might want to read OpenAI charter. [0] It might be not very close to reality currently, but building this replacement and becoming the gatekeeper is literally their declared goal and purpose of existence. And this is what you probably should see as the main "AI threat" (not from the tech itself but from the people controlling it), because if it's possible at all, it might come to reality way earlier than the nonsense rogue AGI fantasy used as a red herring to distract everybody.
It is an assumption, but hypothetically, can you give examples of something that such an AI won't be able to do, assuming that it's already far superior to you at every job that exists today?
> AI is not far superior at every job that exists today.
I wasn't claiming that. I was responding to what you wrote: you quoted the part of my comment that said "[An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity] is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process", which you called an assumption. When you quoted me, were you referring to something else?
