From the article: You know it’s going to be good when an AI executive goes off on a tangent about “hey, what’s a job anyway!” while addressing — or failing to address — the topic of how their tech just might wipe out entire categories of human professions.
Today’s offending party, you’ll be shocked to hear, is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who talks about job destruction an awful lot, and usually in a pretty mealy-mouthed way.
His latest spiel is no exception. In an interview with Rowan Cheung at OpenAI’s DevDay conference on Wednesday, Altman floated the idea that the work you do today, which might imminently be transformed or eliminated by AI, isn’t “real work.”
The idea was brought up after Cheung invoked his favorite thought experiment of considering how a farmer half a century ago might view our current reality. “If you told a farmer fifty years ago that this magical thing called the internet is going to create a billion new jobs,” Cheung said, “he probably wouldn’t believe you.”
In the “intelligence” era, Cheung said, a billion knowledge workers’ jobs will be threatened before new ones are created. Seemingly, Cheung’s point is that it’s not clear what jobs AI will create several decades down the line, just like how a farmer in the past wouldn’t be able to envision how the internet spawned an entire economy.
You could probably poke a few holes in this, like why we’re comparing the future of AI’s impact to asking a farmer about the implications of another emerging technology, in a conversation with the CEO of a half-trillion dollar company that’s building the AI and who would presumably know better than most people — but point taken.
We bring it up because Altman returns to the “farmer” analogy when he’s asked about how a billion jobs might be destroyed before new ones are realized.
“The thing about that farmer,” Altman said, is not only that they wouldn’t believe you, but “they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.’”
This, Altman said, makes him feel “a little less worried” but “more worried in some other ways.”
“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.”
“It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”
Content_Plan3411 on
Yeah well when he gets wiped out, it’ll be okay because maybe he wasn’t a real fucking human to start with.
strangescript on
This isn’t really his take. He has stated repeatedly that he thinks a lot of the “work” we do today wouldn’t look like “real work” to people just a few decades ago. And he believes humans will find more kinds of this “work” to do in the future as AI takes over aspects of our current work.
getapuss on
I hope this asshole doesn’t break his neck when he falls off his soap box.
Frogacuda on
Look, automation killing labor isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a bad thing for capitalism, because capitalism is a labor based system.
We could have a post-labor society in a hypothetical future, but that society is going to have to collectivize the benefits of that automation. The idea that someone is going to own the robots that scraped all of humanity’s knowledge and labor to the benefit of one dude is stupid, that’s not going to happen and even for the one guy benefitting it’s a pretty dystopian vision.
imcalledgpk on
and what the fuck does this guy with the weird fucking face even do?
ketoatl on
I read something about stupid Statements like this. That these tech guys say shit like this at dinner and cocktail parties. Everyone is polite and says nothing . Then they say it out in open and it sounds nuts but they aren’t used to being filtered
SmoothPimp85 on
It’s best to philosophize when you know for sure that there is no risk of ending up without a roof over your head and an empty stomach for the whole day. It wasn’t the corpses of bankers and their families that floated down California’s canals during the Great Depression, but the corpses of farmers. They couldn’t adapt to the new realities of mechanized and chemicalized agriculture, with vast tracts of land in the hands of holding companies.
desteufelsbeitrag on
If billions in “value” can get wiped out literally over night, maybe there was no real value to begin with. Eat the rich.
joogabah on
It’s just a matter of changing the economic system so we don’t have to sell our labor for a right to live. AI makes that technically possible.
I would love to be able to pursue interests and relationships without the necessity of a job that takes up most of my adult life.
There is a dialectical relationship between freedom and necessity. As necessity recedes more freedom is possible. But culture and law lag behind technical development.
whodey84 on
I’m asking all companies to subscribe to my C-Level AI for $1000/mo. What it does is say dumb shit like them, but it isn’t a pedo, and only .01% of the cost.
Final-Shake2331 on
We should start with finding out if Sam Altman’s job is real.
HawaiiNintendo815 on
Psychopath doing psychopath things, who have guessed
Murky-Speech2128 on
Years into development and his latest products are a browser and image manipulation. Just a boring uninspired Dystopian hype machine .
Munkeyman18290 on
This is the wrong argument. No one is concerned with losing their job, people are concerned with losing their **livelihoods**.
If there isn’t enough work to go around for everyone, **then we need to reduce the amount of work required to have a livelihood**.
If we have the resources for everyone to live comfortably (we do) and dont require 40+ or more hours of labor per human, per week to create a comfortable living for everyone (this is what Sam Altman is saying here) then humans should not need to work 40 hours a week to earn a living. If what Sam Altman is saying is true, then the global hourly work week needs to be reduced to accommodate.
We need to start having the right conversations, and it needs to start with not gaslighting working class people who have no choice but to try and find ways to earn a living in this world.
South-Attorney-5209 on
Hes not wrong. Half my coworkers just move things from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet. They could be easily automated out once an engineer has a little time to build the tools. Not real jobs at all. No idea what “skills” theyd list on a resume either.
dread_companion on
So by his logic, ai would be taking over jobs that are not real? So why even ‘take over them’ or need ai if they aren’t real. I despise these tech sleazebag dweebs.
LapsedVerneGagKnee on
Are you born with the ability to be that tone-deaf, or does it come with practice?
ComplaintDry1975 on
And that kind of rhetoric is the justification for employers to reduce employees for more profit.
probability_of_meme on
First, I think he’s wrong, the job losses in reality are just corporate greed making mistakes… But otherwise, if we can automate then we should, ON THE CONDITION that all people share the gains. That’s where he loses it so he can get fucked.
BitingArtist on
You realize they’re just playing a videogame. Money is the high score, and human suffering means nothing because it’s just a game.
Granum22 on
Says the man whose job consists entirely of lying to investors
Superb_Raccoon on
Well, it ismlikely the speed of change that is going to cause issues. At the time of America’s birth, about 95% of the population farmed.
By 1860, that is more like 50%. The first mechanical systems are being developed, like the cotton gin, so that is my reason for 1860
1910? 30% 1960? 9%
Now? Less than 2%.
The thing is that took 250 years to go inverted. There was time to retrain and develop new jobs and markets.
AI is likely to flip job ratios in a decade, if not faster. Especially if robotics continues to make leaps and bounds like it has recently… powered by AI.
What will humans do? Hard to say. We may continue to collapse our numbers as we rely more on robotics and less on humans for labor. If AI can reach the human equivalent of 100 IQ, that makes half the population replaceable… especially non physical labor.
Humans will need to find new purpose in life, as we accelerate AI and robotics as labor. Supervising robotics and/or telepresence operators may be the new “labor” for the average worker. Operating robotics in hostile conditions like mining will be necessary, as well as any on-site repairs/replacements.
Creativity will still be in demand, for those above the 100IQ range. AI will likely be unable to make scientific discoveries for the foreseeable future.
If governments are smart, they will slow down implementing the AI/Robotics revolution so that people and economies will have time to shift.
Will Basic Income become a part of the solution? Probably, but we will have to be closer to surplus resources to get there. Fusion or other unlimited power source, automated resource mining and/or recovery, continued strides in food production, cheaper distribution, etc.
WhiteDirty on
I’m sorry but I’m no way to add a knowledge worker look at other professionals and say that is not real work…. And i work in an extremely difficult job. If anything it’s the opposite. My job is not essential in the event of an emergency. Therefore it’s not real work because it’s not needed for basic survival beyond human needs.
BowsettesBottomBitch on
God, I had read about this guy and he seemed weird as hell but then I saw clips of the interview where he was like “well we haven’t made sex bots yet” and the way he said it was so fucking creepy ugh
snotparty on
Stealing other peoples jobs by stealing other people’s work is the REAL work I guess
Nearing_retirement on
Many jobs can be cut especially in smaller towns midsize firms. Company I work with has 50 people we definitely could cut 20 no problem
HallucinatingAgent on
I mean he’s not wrong, everyone should read the book Bullshit Jobs
Specific_Mirror_4808 on
A lot of jobs aren’t “real jobs” in that they’re not essential. When you look at the army of people behind the cycle of raw products to end consumer there’s a lot of roles that add very little value. Added to that is that a huge number of those cycles just produce tat that people discard very soon after.
That said, the alternative is mass unemployment as companies, surprisingly, don’t want to pay people a living wage to job share the essential jobs on 10 hours/week.
JaggedMetalOs on
If companies don’t need employees maybe they weren’t even making “real products” to start with…
_cob_ on
Billionaires routinely demonstrate how out of touch they are with the humanity they’re trying g to impact.
ghost_desu on
The reason they talk about how disruptive AI is and how it will totally replace so many jobs is the simple fact that it attracts further investor attention. OpenAI especially is a pyramid that hasn’t made any real money and can only pay its debts by getting more investor money.
I have no doubt that some of these tools will have some use at some point but right now their even their hypersubsidized version is entirely worthless for the vast vast majority of complex tasks.
LLMs are good at noticing patterns in large dataswts, that’s what they’re built for and they can make many people’s jobs more productive and easier, reducing staff requirements to some degree. But trying to make them do the jobs on their own is just stupid, not to mention trying to make them do jobs outside of data analysis like anything to do with human interaction (no person on earth likes ai support chatbots)
nonanonymoususername on
Then everyone should stop doing those jobs for him. Don’t serve him food, don’t clean his house, don’t fly his plane , don’t clean, cook, garden …etc Don’t work on building his data centers … have AI pour the concrete and run the wires . We are all dependent on each other… these guys wants us to build the gallows and hang ourselves , and as our last act praise his name for doing it by himself
ruffianrevolution on
Erm, but the secretarial skills that he dismisses as not real work are the same ones he uses to make money from the fictitious “virtual” world.
neo9027581673 on
This is so disrespectful I cannot believe it. A job is simply solving a problem. The owner of said problem may have discovered a more efficient way to solve that problem. But it’s completely ridiculous to say “it wasn’t real work to begin with.” How cringe!
Interesting-Listen28 on
People just need to boo this man everywhere he goes
Avindair on
…says the private school-educated son of a dermatologist and real estate broker who was raised in privilege.
I used to think that making a person like Altman live and work like somebody born without their inherited privilege would jump-start their empathy. All it took to destroy that notion was multiple conversations with C-Suite IT leaders in professional and sometimes casual settings. Only then did I realize that their sociopathy runs far too deep for that kind of transformation.
The system is designed by sociopaths for sociopaths.
JeffGoldblumsChest on
If anyone deserves to lose their job for not doing “real work”, it’s chodes like Sam Altman.
mctrials23 on
I almost preferred it when these utter pricks had the self awareness to know that their views are horrible and they had to present something approaching humanity to the public.
sspiegel on
what does altman do? he’s a venture capitalist, basically just a talking head who gives interviews all day long.
KerouacsGirlfriend on
Ah yes, naked evil.
Hope he sneezes so hard all his skin blows off.
laser50 on
If I learned anything from undercover boss on TV, it’s that they all say they have such a tough job, no one could do it… Until they work for their own company on the lower end and cry profusely about how bad it is..
Sam will never understand real, hard physical work.
blazelet on
Billionaires are entirely happy to sacrifice your lifestyle for their gain.
Kaje26 on
Again, I’d like to see Sam try to do my fucking job.
44 Comments
From the article: You know it’s going to be good when an AI executive goes off on a tangent about “hey, what’s a job anyway!” while addressing — or failing to address — the topic of how their tech just might wipe out entire categories of human professions.
Today’s offending party, you’ll be shocked to hear, is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who talks about job destruction an awful lot, and usually in a pretty mealy-mouthed way.
His latest spiel is no exception. In an interview with Rowan Cheung at OpenAI’s DevDay conference on Wednesday, Altman floated the idea that the work you do today, which might imminently be transformed or eliminated by AI, isn’t “real work.”
The idea was brought up after Cheung invoked his favorite thought experiment of considering how a farmer half a century ago might view our current reality. “If you told a farmer fifty years ago that this magical thing called the internet is going to create a billion new jobs,” Cheung said, “he probably wouldn’t believe you.”
In the “intelligence” era, Cheung said, a billion knowledge workers’ jobs will be threatened before new ones are created. Seemingly, Cheung’s point is that it’s not clear what jobs AI will create several decades down the line, just like how a farmer in the past wouldn’t be able to envision how the internet spawned an entire economy.
You could probably poke a few holes in this, like why we’re comparing the future of AI’s impact to asking a farmer about the implications of another emerging technology, in a conversation with the CEO of a half-trillion dollar company that’s building the AI and who would presumably know better than most people — but point taken.
We bring it up because Altman returns to the “farmer” analogy when he’s asked about how a billion jobs might be destroyed before new ones are realized.
“The thing about that farmer,” Altman said, is not only that they wouldn’t believe you, but “they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.’”
This, Altman said, makes him feel “a little less worried” but “more worried in some other ways.”
“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.”
“It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”
Yeah well when he gets wiped out, it’ll be okay because maybe he wasn’t a real fucking human to start with.
This isn’t really his take. He has stated repeatedly that he thinks a lot of the “work” we do today wouldn’t look like “real work” to people just a few decades ago. And he believes humans will find more kinds of this “work” to do in the future as AI takes over aspects of our current work.
I hope this asshole doesn’t break his neck when he falls off his soap box.
Look, automation killing labor isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a bad thing for capitalism, because capitalism is a labor based system.
We could have a post-labor society in a hypothetical future, but that society is going to have to collectivize the benefits of that automation. The idea that someone is going to own the robots that scraped all of humanity’s knowledge and labor to the benefit of one dude is stupid, that’s not going to happen and even for the one guy benefitting it’s a pretty dystopian vision.
and what the fuck does this guy with the weird fucking face even do?
I read something about stupid Statements like this. That these tech guys say shit like this at dinner and cocktail parties. Everyone is polite and says nothing . Then they say it out in open and it sounds nuts but they aren’t used to being filtered
It’s best to philosophize when you know for sure that there is no risk of ending up without a roof over your head and an empty stomach for the whole day. It wasn’t the corpses of bankers and their families that floated down California’s canals during the Great Depression, but the corpses of farmers. They couldn’t adapt to the new realities of mechanized and chemicalized agriculture, with vast tracts of land in the hands of holding companies.
If billions in “value” can get wiped out literally over night, maybe there was no real value to begin with. Eat the rich.
It’s just a matter of changing the economic system so we don’t have to sell our labor for a right to live. AI makes that technically possible.
I would love to be able to pursue interests and relationships without the necessity of a job that takes up most of my adult life.
There is a dialectical relationship between freedom and necessity. As necessity recedes more freedom is possible. But culture and law lag behind technical development.
I’m asking all companies to subscribe to my C-Level AI for $1000/mo. What it does is say dumb shit like them, but it isn’t a pedo, and only .01% of the cost.
We should start with finding out if Sam Altman’s job is real.
Psychopath doing psychopath things, who have guessed
Years into development and his latest products are a browser and image manipulation. Just a boring uninspired Dystopian hype machine .
This is the wrong argument. No one is concerned with losing their job, people are concerned with losing their **livelihoods**.
If there isn’t enough work to go around for everyone, **then we need to reduce the amount of work required to have a livelihood**.
If we have the resources for everyone to live comfortably (we do) and dont require 40+ or more hours of labor per human, per week to create a comfortable living for everyone (this is what Sam Altman is saying here) then humans should not need to work 40 hours a week to earn a living. If what Sam Altman is saying is true, then the global hourly work week needs to be reduced to accommodate.
We need to start having the right conversations, and it needs to start with not gaslighting working class people who have no choice but to try and find ways to earn a living in this world.
Hes not wrong. Half my coworkers just move things from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet. They could be easily automated out once an engineer has a little time to build the tools. Not real jobs at all. No idea what “skills” theyd list on a resume either.
So by his logic, ai would be taking over jobs that are not real? So why even ‘take over them’ or need ai if they aren’t real. I despise these tech sleazebag dweebs.
Are you born with the ability to be that tone-deaf, or does it come with practice?
And that kind of rhetoric is the justification for employers to reduce employees for more profit.
First, I think he’s wrong, the job losses in reality are just corporate greed making mistakes… But otherwise, if we can automate then we should, ON THE CONDITION that all people share the gains. That’s where he loses it so he can get fucked.
You realize they’re just playing a videogame. Money is the high score, and human suffering means nothing because it’s just a game.
Says the man whose job consists entirely of lying to investors
Well, it ismlikely the speed of change that is going to cause issues. At the time of America’s birth, about 95% of the population farmed.
By 1860, that is more like 50%. The first mechanical systems are being developed, like the cotton gin, so that is my reason for 1860
1910? 30% 1960? 9%
Now? Less than 2%.
The thing is that took 250 years to go inverted. There was time to retrain and develop new jobs and markets.
AI is likely to flip job ratios in a decade, if not faster. Especially if robotics continues to make leaps and bounds like it has recently… powered by AI.
What will humans do? Hard to say. We may continue to collapse our numbers as we rely more on robotics and less on humans for labor. If AI can reach the human equivalent of 100 IQ, that makes half the population replaceable… especially non physical labor.
Humans will need to find new purpose in life, as we accelerate AI and robotics as labor. Supervising robotics and/or telepresence operators may be the new “labor” for the average worker. Operating robotics in hostile conditions like mining will be necessary, as well as any on-site repairs/replacements.
Creativity will still be in demand, for those above the 100IQ range. AI will likely be unable to make scientific discoveries for the foreseeable future.
If governments are smart, they will slow down implementing the AI/Robotics revolution so that people and economies will have time to shift.
Will Basic Income become a part of the solution? Probably, but we will have to be closer to surplus resources to get there. Fusion or other unlimited power source, automated resource mining and/or recovery, continued strides in food production, cheaper distribution, etc.
I’m sorry but I’m no way to add a knowledge worker look at other professionals and say that is not real work…. And i work in an extremely difficult job. If anything it’s the opposite. My job is not essential in the event of an emergency. Therefore it’s not real work because it’s not needed for basic survival beyond human needs.
God, I had read about this guy and he seemed weird as hell but then I saw clips of the interview where he was like “well we haven’t made sex bots yet” and the way he said it was so fucking creepy ugh
Stealing other peoples jobs by stealing other people’s work is the REAL work I guess
Many jobs can be cut especially in smaller towns midsize firms. Company I work with has 50 people we definitely could cut 20 no problem
I mean he’s not wrong, everyone should read the book Bullshit Jobs
A lot of jobs aren’t “real jobs” in that they’re not essential. When you look at the army of people behind the cycle of raw products to end consumer there’s a lot of roles that add very little value. Added to that is that a huge number of those cycles just produce tat that people discard very soon after.
That said, the alternative is mass unemployment as companies, surprisingly, don’t want to pay people a living wage to job share the essential jobs on 10 hours/week.
If companies don’t need employees maybe they weren’t even making “real products” to start with…
Billionaires routinely demonstrate how out of touch they are with the humanity they’re trying g to impact.
The reason they talk about how disruptive AI is and how it will totally replace so many jobs is the simple fact that it attracts further investor attention. OpenAI especially is a pyramid that hasn’t made any real money and can only pay its debts by getting more investor money.
I have no doubt that some of these tools will have some use at some point but right now their even their hypersubsidized version is entirely worthless for the vast vast majority of complex tasks.
LLMs are good at noticing patterns in large dataswts, that’s what they’re built for and they can make many people’s jobs more productive and easier, reducing staff requirements to some degree. But trying to make them do the jobs on their own is just stupid, not to mention trying to make them do jobs outside of data analysis like anything to do with human interaction (no person on earth likes ai support chatbots)
Then everyone should stop doing those jobs for him. Don’t serve him food, don’t clean his house, don’t fly his plane , don’t clean, cook, garden …etc Don’t work on building his data centers … have AI pour the concrete and run the wires . We are all dependent on each other… these guys wants us to build the gallows and hang ourselves , and as our last act praise his name for doing it by himself
Erm, but the secretarial skills that he dismisses as not real work are the same ones he uses to make money from the fictitious “virtual” world.
This is so disrespectful I cannot believe it. A job is simply solving a problem. The owner of said problem may have discovered a more efficient way to solve that problem. But it’s completely ridiculous to say “it wasn’t real work to begin with.” How cringe!
People just need to boo this man everywhere he goes
…says the private school-educated son of a dermatologist and real estate broker who was raised in privilege.
I used to think that making a person like Altman live and work like somebody born without their inherited privilege would jump-start their empathy. All it took to destroy that notion was multiple conversations with C-Suite IT leaders in professional and sometimes casual settings. Only then did I realize that their sociopathy runs far too deep for that kind of transformation.
The system is designed by sociopaths for sociopaths.
If anyone deserves to lose their job for not doing “real work”, it’s chodes like Sam Altman.
I almost preferred it when these utter pricks had the self awareness to know that their views are horrible and they had to present something approaching humanity to the public.
what does altman do? he’s a venture capitalist, basically just a talking head who gives interviews all day long.
Ah yes, naked evil.
Hope he sneezes so hard all his skin blows off.
If I learned anything from undercover boss on TV, it’s that they all say they have such a tough job, no one could do it… Until they work for their own company on the lower end and cry profusely about how bad it is..
Sam will never understand real, hard physical work.
Billionaires are entirely happy to sacrifice your lifestyle for their gain.
Again, I’d like to see Sam try to do my fucking job.