Tyler Cowen’s latest Bloomberg column on the dangers of AI predicts, among other things, that AI will disrupt the current high status and earnings of “wordcels” and “ideas people.” The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.
It occurs to me that (relative to my consumption ability) there is already approximately infinite content on the Internet.
My consumption of this sea of content is not evenly distributed. I do not randomly sample, and I don't think anyone else does either.
What do we actually do? Our content consumption is socially biased.
1. We consume content that is popular in our social group so that we can talk about something with our friends. (For everyone who is progress-adjacent, Maximum Progress is a must-read!)
2. We become attached to particular online characters, and want to read their work. (I like Max's takes on metascience, so I also want to see what he has to say about land reclamation.)
3. We do searches for particular information where it is in fact more transactional. (This might go away because I can just ask GPT-N≥4.)
To Robin Hanson at you, online writing isn't about information.
Your analogy with farming for me thinking. Nowadays bad and ok quality food has been commoditised, but rich people pay a premium for high quality, more artisan, more unusual foods. Here in the UK there are exceptions of relatively cheap but high quality content, such as the BBC and the Guardian. On the quality/cost graph, these would be outlier plots, with that status attributable to alternate revenue streams ie. the public license fee (BBC) and donations (the Guardian), coupled with a public service mission. But the general point I’m making stands. I could see the work of ideas people following a similar trajectory. Largely a commoditised and bad-to-ok quality, generated by AI, for a free or low price to the masses, with a premium being paid for the really good stuff (human created, above the level of what AI can do). So pretty similar to how things are now, with paid subscriber-only content. Only that the quantity and quality of the free and cheap stuff will increase. Pushing the average quality from human idea generators higher. The big assumption here is that some humans CAN still generate better ideas than AIs. We’ve seen AI beat the best humans at Go and StarCraft. And do protein folding and other crazy-scale things. But will similar achievements become dominant for ideas? None of us know right now. The tech is improving rapidly but we don’t know when the limits will be reached and what they will be. And over what time frame we are talking - tens of years, hundreds of years? Also: ideas are easy to have, but putting them out with high production values is much harder (but let’s not go down that rabbit hole now!). I suspect we will be waiting a very very long time before AI is routinely able to out-idea a brilliant human with a few AI copilots 🙂
What I will say is that there is a difference between uncreative wordcels that are just kinda good at writing very cliche articles that sound good and wordcels who can dig into the data and produce new insight. If the latter are replaced, than I struggle to think about any career path involving thinking that won't be replaced. Maybe those who work with both mind and hands? Like say experimental biologists, doctors and so on?
But why would a creative wordcel be more replaceable than say, a computer programmer?
As I brought up IRL, even though I can't find an objection to our comparative advantage in the physical world, one cooler way of thinking about it is we might become cyborgs with large AI "cortexes" augmenting (or substituting for large parts of) our brain. Human body + AI mind
`"Practicing my Handwriting in 1439" is a piece by Maxwell Tabarrok. The piece discusses how handwriting remained an essential skill for centuries after the printing press was invented, and only recently has it become less important. The piece also references a Bloomberg column by Tyler Cowen, which predicts that AI will disrupt the status and earnings of "wordcels" and "ideas people".`
Yes, who knows? Remember when word processing was going to reduce paper use because we would not need multiple drafts of documents to edict them? It did eliminate 'secretaries "but did no devalue office work.
My bet is that although being multilingual will lose usefulness and earning potential, it will be great for status. A proficient speaker should always be quicker and more natural as translation latency will never go away due to differing sentence structure and context windows. That's why I'm streamlining my language learning goals to basically learn a couple of languages to high proficiency rather than becoming a polyglot.
AI has been so nerfed on discussing "controversial" topics, I imagine that idea people writing in the realms of politics, culture, etc. will be important for awhile unless the major tech corporations radically shift in culture (which seems highly unlikely).
It occurs to me that (relative to my consumption ability) there is already approximately infinite content on the Internet.
My consumption of this sea of content is not evenly distributed. I do not randomly sample, and I don't think anyone else does either.
What do we actually do? Our content consumption is socially biased.
1. We consume content that is popular in our social group so that we can talk about something with our friends. (For everyone who is progress-adjacent, Maximum Progress is a must-read!)
2. We become attached to particular online characters, and want to read their work. (I like Max's takes on metascience, so I also want to see what he has to say about land reclamation.)
3. We do searches for particular information where it is in fact more transactional. (This might go away because I can just ask GPT-N≥4.)
To Robin Hanson at you, online writing isn't about information.
Epistemic status: highly speculative.
Your analogy with farming for me thinking. Nowadays bad and ok quality food has been commoditised, but rich people pay a premium for high quality, more artisan, more unusual foods. Here in the UK there are exceptions of relatively cheap but high quality content, such as the BBC and the Guardian. On the quality/cost graph, these would be outlier plots, with that status attributable to alternate revenue streams ie. the public license fee (BBC) and donations (the Guardian), coupled with a public service mission. But the general point I’m making stands. I could see the work of ideas people following a similar trajectory. Largely a commoditised and bad-to-ok quality, generated by AI, for a free or low price to the masses, with a premium being paid for the really good stuff (human created, above the level of what AI can do). So pretty similar to how things are now, with paid subscriber-only content. Only that the quantity and quality of the free and cheap stuff will increase. Pushing the average quality from human idea generators higher. The big assumption here is that some humans CAN still generate better ideas than AIs. We’ve seen AI beat the best humans at Go and StarCraft. And do protein folding and other crazy-scale things. But will similar achievements become dominant for ideas? None of us know right now. The tech is improving rapidly but we don’t know when the limits will be reached and what they will be. And over what time frame we are talking - tens of years, hundreds of years? Also: ideas are easy to have, but putting them out with high production values is much harder (but let’s not go down that rabbit hole now!). I suspect we will be waiting a very very long time before AI is routinely able to out-idea a brilliant human with a few AI copilots 🙂
this is pretty concerning, indeed.
What I will say is that there is a difference between uncreative wordcels that are just kinda good at writing very cliche articles that sound good and wordcels who can dig into the data and produce new insight. If the latter are replaced, than I struggle to think about any career path involving thinking that won't be replaced. Maybe those who work with both mind and hands? Like say experimental biologists, doctors and so on?
But why would a creative wordcel be more replaceable than say, a computer programmer?
As I brought up IRL, even though I can't find an objection to our comparative advantage in the physical world, one cooler way of thinking about it is we might become cyborgs with large AI "cortexes" augmenting (or substituting for large parts of) our brain. Human body + AI mind
`"Practicing my Handwriting in 1439" is a piece by Maxwell Tabarrok. The piece discusses how handwriting remained an essential skill for centuries after the printing press was invented, and only recently has it become less important. The piece also references a Bloomberg column by Tyler Cowen, which predicts that AI will disrupt the status and earnings of "wordcels" and "ideas people".`
- Google Search's generative AI answer
Yes, who knows? Remember when word processing was going to reduce paper use because we would not need multiple drafts of documents to edict them? It did eliminate 'secretaries "but did no devalue office work.
My bet is that although being multilingual will lose usefulness and earning potential, it will be great for status. A proficient speaker should always be quicker and more natural as translation latency will never go away due to differing sentence structure and context windows. That's why I'm streamlining my language learning goals to basically learn a couple of languages to high proficiency rather than becoming a polyglot.
AI has been so nerfed on discussing "controversial" topics, I imagine that idea people writing in the realms of politics, culture, etc. will be important for awhile unless the major tech corporations radically shift in culture (which seems highly unlikely).