I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
I've worked for big corporations that employ a lot of people. Every job has a metric showing how much money every single task they do creates. Believe me. They would never pay you if your tasks didn't generate more money than they need to pay you to do the task.
Management accountants would love to do this. In practise you can only do this for low level, commoditised roles.
Mopping a floor has a determined metric. I'm not kidding. It's a metric. Clean bathrooms are worth a determined dollar amount. It's not simply sales or production, every task has a dollar amount. The amount of time it takes to do the task has a dollar value determined and on paper. Corporations know what every task is worth in dollar amounts. Processing Hazmats? Prevents the fine. Removing trash or pallets? Prevents lawsuits and workplace injury. Level of light reflected from the floor? Has a multiplier effect on sales. Determined. Defined. Training sales people on language choices, massive sales effect. They know how much money every single tasks generates, fines or lawsuits prevented, multiplier effects on average ticket sales, training to say ' highest consumer rated repair services ' instead of 'extended warentee' these are on paper defined dollar amounts. There is NO JOB in which you are paid to do something of no financial value. There are no unprofitable positions or tasks.
Your examples are all commoditized and measurable. Many roles are not this quantifiable.
Compliance, marketing, social outreach, branding.
Putting a $ amount on these and other similar roles is very difficult.
But I agree, if the value added is known to be zero or negative then usually no-one is paid to do it.
Not when they are set up, but they can become unprofitable over time, and get overlooked.
This is part of the reason I don't work for big corporations.. yuck