How A.I. may affect jobs and work
- sciart0
- Apr 18
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Economists have been debating how AI will affect work.
Does it replace people? Does it help highly educated people but hurt less-educated people? Does it help everybody? But you’re looking at it differently.
People imagine that AI is going to automate things, but they don’t appreciate that automation is just one path. There’s nothing intrinsic about machine learning or AI that puts us on that path. The other path is really the path of augmentation. For me, bicycles for the mind describe that.
Whether we end up building things that replace us, or things that enhance our capacities, that is something that we can influence. But I am feeling as much urgency as everyone else: If we keep going down the automation path, it’s going to be very hard to walk back and start changing things.
What’s wrong with how AI tools are being developed and deployed?
Every time Anthropic or OpenAI or Google releases a new model, you’ll notice they always talk about, oh, we did better on these benchmarks. That’s the way they keep score. In many ways those benchmarks dictate what these models are asked to be good at.
We pick an area and then we say, “Can this thing do this as well as people?” So we’re building algorithms with a strong capability for automation. And when we say they’re getting better and better, we mean their capabilities for automation are getting better and better.
If you look at the standard benchmarks, there is nothing in them that would make you say, “Oh, here’s a metric for helping a person do something better.”'