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Thought experiment: do you think some part of your job will be automated before or after hospitals automate away 50% of their medical staff?


Depends on which job:

Programming, machine learning: it's constantly being automated, which leads to paradigm shifts. Those new paradigms are then studied, understood, and automated. Automation is about "not doing the same thing over and over again so you can solve new problems."

Programming, games: I'm giving a talk later this month about automating game production with machine learning. You can't really use machine learning to be "creative" yet, but you can use it to generate novel game assets, which is actually where most of the time is spent in game dev. There's also a lot of pipeline improvements that could be made by existing tools companies, most notably Adobe and Autodesk. So the upshot is it will be possible for small teams to create much more expansive game worlds. Make GTA V for $1M instead of $260M kind of thing. But even then, the history of game design has been automating different pieces -- it's basically the reason for the existence of game engines.

Starting businesses: This is controversial, but I think entrepreneurship is the highest intellectual endeavor. It requires you to apply everything you've learned about life, the universe, and everything in ways that most people haven't thought of. I think you'd need a very real AGI to do this; although I suppose I could see an algo running P&G or J&J and making decisions about what brands to invest in and divest from, along with how to market based on what people are saying on social media, stuff like that.




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